She was working with the Arizona Cardinals three years ago, as the first female assistant coach in the NFL, and people kept talking about how remarkable it was that she was living out her dream.

“Well, no, actually,” Welter said. “This is a dream that I wasn’t permitted to have, because there was no one I could look at and say, ‘I want to be her when I grow up.’ ”

Welter, 40, is determined to change that dynamic.

Although she only spent a few months with the Cardinals, coaching inside linebackers during offseason training sessions, training camp and the 2015 preseason as part of an NFL fellowship program for minority coaches, she’s using that experience to encourage and empower more women to get involved in football, a game most girls weren’t allowed to play growing up.

“The importance of being the first in anything is to ensure that you’re not the last, because it opens doors and it opens minds at the same time,” she said Wednesday.

So, Welter travels the country sharing her story as a motivational speaker and conducts football camps designed for girls ages 6-18. The next one is 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday at Mountain View High School in Loveland, where Welter and former NFL defensive back Rodney Thomas, among others, will teach participants basic skills and strategy through flag football.

(Story continues below photo)

Jen Welter, who was an assistant coach for the Arizona Cardinals during training camp and preseason games in 2015, watches from the sidelines during a preseason game against the San Diego Chargers. Praising the coaches and players for accepting her without reservation, Welter is proud she's opened another door for women in men's professional sports as the first female coach of any kind on an NFL team.(Photo: Matt York/AP)

Welter’s story is a good one.

The Florida native played rugby at Boston College while earning a bachelor’s degree in business and started playing in a local women’s flag football league as she began what she thought would be a career in the corporate world.

When the coach of the Mass Mutiny, a women’s tackle football team, talked to officials with the flag football league about potential prospects, Welter’s name came up. She spent the next two years playing for the Mutiny before moving to Dallas. She joined another women’s tackle football team there, the Dallas Dragons, that folded after a year, then tried out for a spot on the Dallas Diamonds.

Welter, a 5-foot-2, 130-pound linebacker, played for the Diamonds for 10 years, winning four national championships and earning gold medals on the first two U.S. national teams to play in women’s football world championship tournaments.

In 2014, she earned a spot on the roster of the Texas Revolution, a men’s team in the Champions Indoor Football league. She played running back for the Revolution, running three times for minus-1 yards in a preseason game while becoming the first woman to play a position other than kicker in a men’s professional football league. She spent most of the year on the practice squad while earning the respect of her teammates and coaches with her extensive knowledge of the game.

When the Revolution hired a new coach, Wendell Davis, the following year, he offered her a job as the team’s linebackers and special teams coach.

“He basically said, ‘You have to coach my football team,’ " Welter said. “He saw the relationships I had with the guys; they trusted me. We had great relationships. And he was impressed with my football IQ.

“I just kind of looked at him, and I was like, ‘No, I’m not going to do that; girls don’t coach football. I can’t coach football.

“Wendell was great. He said, ‘Not a lot of guys are going to give you this opportunity; you’re taking this job.’ ”

“I said, ‘No.’ ”

Davis, she said, called back the next day and said he accepted the job for her.

“ ‘You’re coaching for me,’ he said. ‘And, by the way, you can’t quit, otherwise the entire narrative surrounding women coaching in men’s professional football will be we had a girl once, and she quit.’

“Boy oh boy, did he have my number.”

The timing couldn’t have been better, she said.

A few months later, the NFL announced Sarah Thomas would become the first permanent female official in the league. Upon hearing that news, Arizona Cardinals coach Bruce Arians was asked by a reporter if he could envision a woman ever coaching in the NFL.

“He said the second a woman proves she can make these guys better, she’ll be hired,” Welter said. “I took that as a little bit of a challenge.”

Posing as an assistant to the head coach of the Revolution rather than the assistant coach she actually was, Welter got in touch with the assistant of the Cardinals coach and told him there was already a woman coaching in men’s professional football and that “my head coach would like to talk to his head coach about her.”

A few weeks later, Arians made the call to Davis to inquire about Welter, brought her to Arizona for one of the NFL’s official organized team activities and hired her to work with the team through its remaining OTAs, minicamps, training camp and the preseason through the NFL’s Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship program.

Players, she said, had already been told about her background and had even seen game film of her playing for the Revolution. They respected Arians and trusted that he knew what he was doing. They were genuinely excited, she said, to be a part of history.

“The beautiful thing is the best of the best just want to get better, and if you make them better, that packaging doesn’t really matter,” Welter said. “It may take a little longer to develop that trust with some people, but there were no, ‘Oh, we’re going to test you,’ moments. They were open, excited and supportive and still are to this day.”

Welter’s stint only lasted for a few months. The NFL had two full-time female assistant coaches last season — Kathryn Smith, a quality control assistant with the Buffalo Bills; and Katie Sowers, an offensive assistant with the San Francisco 49ers. A third, Colorado State University graduate Kelsey Martinez, was just hired as an assistant strength coach by the Oakland Raiders.

Welter believes the door she opened will never close.

“Now, any girl or woman who has a love and a passion for football can see it as a possibility,” she said.

The goal of the camp, Welter said, is to empower girls by teaching them the skills necessary to play a game that has been traditionally off limits to them.

"Everybody would say football was the final frontier for women in sports, so I really believed if we could do this as women and girls, cross that final frontier, than there is really no game you cannot play, no field you can't be on," said Welter, who has a master's degree in sports psychology and a Ph.D. in psychology.